Button Box by Ruth Enright
Genre: Young adult, Victorian era, Contemporary fiction
Read: 10th August 2022
Published: 19th July 2022
★★ 2 stars
DESCRIPTION:
A young girl finds herself living in two different worlds – the present and a dangerous Victorian past.
When Susan’s dad wants to marry again, she is thrown into a whole new family where she feels excluded. Playing with her much loved old button box for comfort, she discovers a passage to a different time – the busy turmoil of 1850s London. Here, she lives with Baxter, a canny orphan boy who has adopted her as his sister.
With Baxter, Susan is never lonely, but children like them must work and do almost anything to get by. Surviving as best they can on the criminal margins of a colourful city, they are soon drawn into dangerous activities.
Baxter and Susan plunge together into wild adventures in a tangled Victorian underworld. They meet extraordinary people from all walks of life – costermongers, thieves and fences, acrobats and street children, eccentric scientists, a rich explorer, nightmarish villains, and even Queen Victoria herself.
A lively and gripping story full of suspense and atmosphere, ‘Button Box’ will take you into another world!
MY THOUGHTS:
The premise for BUTTON BOX sounded so intriguing. A young girl finds a portal into Victorian London from the loneliness and mundanity of her everyday life in the modern world. There she comes up against all sorts of things that she would never have been privy to nor known about otherwise.
Susan's father has decided to remarry and the new mother's three daughters were to be likely new friends as well as stepsisters for her. Or that's what her father and new mother anticipated. In actual fact, the three girls were like the horrible ugly stepsisters from "Cinderella", taunting and teasing and bullying young Susan into a life of loneliness. And one that her father either seemed oblivious to or didn't care in light of his new-found love and their change in circumstances. The three girls come across as entitled and bitchy, as if they are better than Susan. And so she locks herself away in her bedroom with just her button box of treasures for company.
And just like that, Susan steps into another world a hundred and fifty years past at a time when Queen Victoria reigned, and life on the streets for young orphans was tough. Which is what Susan was in Victorian London - an orphaned. But befriended by Baxter, he teaches her the ways of the streets and together they get up to all sorts and she soon finds that she prefers this old world alongside Baxter enduring hardship than that of her modern world in a family that doesn't really want her.
The concept was intriguing, as was the premise, but the story I found to be lack lustre and a little boring. Maybe I gave up too soon but I just couldn't like the book no matter how much I wanted to...and I really wanted to. The fact that it is written for children to young adults makes the timeslips a little confusing as it jumps from modern day to Victorian with something of a bump or two rather than the seamless transition I would expect. Younger minds may find this confusing.
I'm disappointed that I didn't enjoy BUTTON BOX because it featured a time I love to read about - Victorian times - that this part felt a little like Lindsey Hutchinson but there the similarities ended. Maybe I was in the wrong mindset - as is sometimes the case. So maybe I will pick it up at a later date and try again because I do believe it has the potential to be a fascinating tale.
I would like to thank #RuthEnright and #BlossomSpringPublishing for an ARC of #ButtonBox in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
Ruth studied English Language and Literature at Reading University and has always had the ambition to write herself. She lives in Manchester with her family and works for local government, where she has held a number of posts. She is now an Information Governance Officer. Ruth came to Manchester as a graduate trainee in Librarianship with Manchester Polytechnic before changing career paths and training for a certificate in teaching lipreading to adults with acquired deafness in Adult Education. Ruth then had her daughter and later became a local government officer.
Ruth has always kept on writing and started a blog a few years ago for her poems, stories and other items. Encouraged by readers, she has recently succeeded in having five short stories published by ‘Yours Fiction’ special short story quarterly magazine.
Ruth loves to read and enjoys writing in both historic and modern settings, experimenting with different genres. Ideas for her writing come from many sources, for instance the name of Robin’s uncle Jorfant in ‘Seahaven’ came from researching her partner’s family tree!
Ruth lives with her partner Jack, and a cat called Margot. Ruth is delighted to be a published author and is looking forward very much to writing more novels.
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